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iPad not a good fit for vacationing with a dSLR

I was hoping that I'd be able leave my MacBook Air at home for my vacation, but unfortunately the iPad just doesn't cut it, here's why...
Written by Jason D. O'Grady, Contributor

I'm going on vacation next week (David Morgenstern will be holding down the fort here at TAC) and I was hoping to leave my MacBook Air at home. I wanted to bring only my iPad 3 for photo syncing and occasional Web surfing -- but I don't think that the iPad will cut it.

The main problem is my big dSLR. I plan on taking a lot of photos with a Nikon D4 on vacation and although Apple sells an iPad Camera Connection Kit ($29, Apple Store) I'm not sure if the Sony XQD Card Reader (which comes with the Nikon D4) will work with it.

The Sony XQD reader requires an operating current of 900mA and the iPad only puts out (an estimated) 80-200mA via the CCK.

Some people use a CF to SD card adapter in the D4's second card slot, then you could conceivably import the photos from the SD card to iPad 3 via the CCK, but this seems like too much of a kludge to me. I also considered connecting my D4 to the CCK (via a standard USB cable) to download my photos but I couldn't find anyone that had successfully done this.

The other option would be to use the Nikon WT-5 wireless transmitter to upload photos to an FTP server, but it costs $900 and is overkill for my needs. Plus I'd need a solid Wi-Fi connection to do the uploading, which isn't always available on the road.

The other problem is that even a 64GB iPad would be pretty easy to fill with 50MB RAW files from the D4, so I'd have to either pick and choose what photos to sync to the iPad or shoot to several different memory cards and do a mass import to Aperture when I get home.

While there's no doubt that the iPad definitely has a place in a professional photography workflow (it's amazing to remotely control the D4 with an iPad) it's not a good fit as a primary "post PC" if you're vacationing with a dSLR camera.

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